I don’t play tennis. I don’t like it. I've played a few times and I’m not any good. But rather than putting any effort into trying to learn or improve, I just don’t play at all.
I’ve been this way for as long as I remember. Revelling in my successes but shrinking away the moment I came up against a mistake or a challenge I could not overcome with ease. If I am not good at something, I don’t like it and won’t participate.
Growing up, I was given plenty of praise. I was told I was “smart” or “gifted” or “good” at something, and it’s only been later in life that I discovered my irrational unwillingness to play tennis and this particular type of praise might be linked.
Carol Dweck has spent the better part of the last 4 decades studying praise and how it influences achievement and motivation. Praising students for their intelligence may boost their confidence, but what happens when they then are faced with failure or difficulty?
To find out, Dweck gave students an easy test followed by a single line of praise. The praise was either for their intelligence (“You must be smart at this”) or for their effort (“You must have worked really hard”).
After this, all students were given some harder problems to do, and then a second easy test. The results on the second easy test showed a big difference between the two types of praise! The group who had been praised for their efforts improved their first score by about 30%. However, the students who were told they were smart scored lower than their initial test by about 20%.
“When we praise children for their intelligence,” Dweck wrote in the study summary, “we tell them that this is the name of the game: look smart, don’t risk making mistakes... Emphasising effort gives a child a variable that they can control... Emphasising natural intelligence takes it out of the child’s control and it provides no good recipe for responding to a failure.”
This study really is an excellent illustration of the profound impact mindset has on motivation and success, as well as a wonderful demonstration of how influential something seemingly trivial, such as a single line of praise, can be.
The students praised for intelligence adopted the fixed mindset - a belief that intelligence is static and predetermined. When confronted with the more difficult questions, they attributed their failures to a lack of ability which, as we saw, had a significant and immediate effect on motivation and performance. People with this mindset tend to avoid challenges (like learning to play tennis), give up easily, ignore any negative feedback, believe effort is futile and feel threatened by the success of others, which all sounds pretty grim! Yet this is exactly what we are encouraging albeit unintentionally, when we praise ability.
The other students, however, adopted the growth mindset - achievement is directly positively related to purposeful engagement and effort. They flourished when presented with a challenge because they correctly saw it for what it was: learning. Experiencing the discomfort of making a mistake or coming across something you cannot do (for example, infants learning to walk) allows the brain to adapt to new models which is, again, learning. People with the growth mindset tend to see opportunities in mistakes, persist after setbacks, take and use criticism to grow and are inspired by others’ success.
What does it mean for me?
Clearly, not all praise is created equal. While the relationship between praise, mindsets and performance is not as simple as it may appear (nothing in psychology ever is...), there are certainly methods of praise and encouragement that are more effective than others (these are also useful for self-talk if you are particularly hard on yourself!):
emphasise effort when giving praise
equally, emphasise effort when evaluating a poor performance
praise the process over the result
try to avoid praise that encourages comparisons
be interested in mistakes and challenges rather than dismissing them as due to a lack of ability
Our brains are spectacularly adaptable, so even if you, like me, you recognise that you have a fixed mindset later in life, the research shows that you can learn to adopt the growth mindset. Carol Dweck says, “Changing mind-sets is not like surgery. You can’t simply remove the fixed mindset and replace it with the growth mindset”. It just takes a bit of effort!
Article by Ali Bryan - Shiny Things, Educational Content Development
Continue reading more on Carol's research and work at her Mindset website.
